Many types of desktop applications allow users to add images and associated text annotations to their documents. For instance, many word processing applications, spreadsheet applications, and presentation applications allow a user to insert one or more images into a document and to place text annotations in relation to the images. These applications, however, generally provide little or no design guidance on how the images and the associated text annotations should be laid out in relation to one another. Instead, most applications require users to manually lay out the images and the associated text annotations.
While a manual approach to laying out images and associated text annotations does provide great flexibility for highly skilled designers, most users do not possess the creative design skills necessary to create a professional-looking layout of images and associated text. As a result, many users end up creating layouts with images and associated text that look amateurish, include misaligned or inappropriately sized images, and possibly text annotations that are inappropriately located or sized for the layout of the related images. In many cases, manually generated layouts simply do not communicate the message desired by the user.
Some desktop applications do provide limited functionality for assisting a user in laying out multiple images on a page automatically using static templates. These types of applications do not, however, dynamically lay out images and do not provide any guidance for laying out text annotations that are associated with the images. Moreover, these types of applications generally force users to utilize the exact structure and design of the provided templates. Users may not be permitted to modify the layout provided by the templates through the rearrangement or addition of images or related text. This can be frustrating for a user attempting to create a layout that includes text annotations or more or fewer images than permitted by the template.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.